Category: Other stuff

Okay, things have been quite quiet on the blog front and other web site stuff really. I’ve been making a few changes behind the scenes to the web site and it’s functionality – just ironing some of the gremlins out. I’ve also migrated my development system away from VMWare Player to VirtualBox. On the whole, I’m pretty impressed by Virtual box and it’s ability to directly(ish) use VMWares vmdk virtual hard disks images. I’ll perhaps go into my virutalization exploits on another blog entry as I’ve now tried a few and come across some of there pros and cons.

Mainly, I’ve been attacking yet another Away3D demo. It’s still under wraps but should be available soon (examples and source code to be included I think). It’s taking longer than I had hoped as my maths skills aren’t that great and it’s taking a while ot find the relevant answers from google. I just hope the demo works how I hope it will, in the end.

I’ve started on a windows forms project as well as a bit of an English spelling learning aid for primary school children (UK Reception years through to Years 6) following the National Literacy Strategy but this is in very early stages at the moment.

I began my attempts in PV3D by simply adding an embedded bitmap as a material to a plane and getting that to appear and then move it closer to the camera. As I said, small simple steps.

After this, I got a bit more adventurous – web service calls. After another Googling, I found AMFPHP1.9beta. This is a Flash/PHP web service engine that seemed very straight forward to set up. I managed to create three services that I can call from within my PV3D application. A specific image detail retriever, an ID retriever and a next image retriever. They all work a treat and aren’t that complicated.

I came across a reference (can’t remember where though) to Papervision3d. It’s a 3D graphics engine for Flash/Flex/Apollo. As I haven’t really done anything in Flash but have been keen to get some 3D stuff out on the web, I thought it was time to give it a go.

I initially needed a way of building the SWF files in a free way. I new the Flex SDK was a free distribution but FlexBuilder and the Eclipse plugin was only available for a 30 day trial. After a bit of Googling, I came across FlashDevelop and numerous blog entries for it’s configuration to build ActionScript2, ActionScript3 and Flex code – ideal. Once I’d set this up in a virtual PC (I might blog something on that later – it’s a great way to work), I ran through a few of the examples available from the Papervision3D download. Very impressed I was too.

I’ve got a few ideas rumbling away but initially I wanted to look at trying to get some kind of advertising on my home-page. Rather than just being static text or images, I wanted to do something in 3D – PV3D. Some of the demo’s I’d seen for PV3D show image gallaries in a 3D space – this seems like a way forward.